Deglamming the Big D in "Dallas Buyers Club"

So. Dallas Buyers Club. I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts about this movie for a week now, but I can’t seem to come to a cohesive take on it. This may come out as a rather disjointed review, but here goes.

First off, what is it? Matthew McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a blue collar, womanizing cowboy from the Dallas area who unexpectedly finds out that he is very ill, and that, in fact, he has AIDS. After just a few minutes of watching the movie, it does not seem all that shocking to viewers, because he is appears to be having a lot of very casual sex (and be prepared to see it in action), not to mention a lot of drugs and drinking. But he is surprised, because it’s 1985, and straight white guys don’t think that the AIDS epidemic has anything to do with them, no matter how depraved their lifestyles may be.

From the moment he wakes up in the hospital, we are reminded of what it was like in the early days of AIDS. The doctors wear gloves and masks, and they keep a bit of a distance as they rather coldly tell this man that he has about 30 days to live. His friends turn on him, and he becomes an outcast.

In the next bed is a transgendered man, living as a woman, named Rayon. (Side note: At one point Rayon is wearing the very rabbit fur coat that I coveted from my 8th-grade classmates. Just thought you should know.) Rayon is also an AIDS patient, and he reaches out in a friendly way to Ron, a friendliness that Ron is utterly unable to accept. Eventually these two become business partners in the Dallas Buyers Club, a backroom organization that brings in unapproved drugs for those who can’t acquire or tolerate the AZT that is being tested in the Dallas hospital.

Matthew McConaughey is on fire this year. And in this movie, he is also unrecognizable. As is Jared Leto, who looks a far cry from Claire Danes’ dreamy crush on “My So-Called Life.” Both are fantastic in their roles, going far beyond the change of look for each of them. A friend asked me if Matthew managed to be unattractive, and I had to respond that I honestly found him unappealing in every way. But then, ropers never were my thing. There was one scene where he smiled, and I thought, “Oh yeah, those are his teeth.” Other than that, yup, he achieved unattractive very well.

An effective aspect of this movie is that I don’t necessarily like either Ron or Rayon. I sort of expected that the Ron Woodroof character would not look too good, but I wondered if Rayon’s character would be played up to martyrdom in an effort to promote tolerance. I don’t like it when any character is sainted too much to believe. This was not an issue at all. Each of them definitely showed weakness and brokenness, though Rayon is certainly a more sympathetic character than Ron.

I actually like the movie more for not making the main characters overly likeable, because it reinforces the fact that we don’t reserve love only for those people who we like or who have it together or who live the way we think they should. And these two do not become saints—they continue on in their respective habits and weaknesses. These are people living on the margins of life, albeit completely opposite margins.

Jennifer Garner plays a doctor who shows more heart than the rest, and I felt a bit like she was a glimpse of Jesus in the midst of it all. Compassionate, caring for each person as an individual in spite of the stigma of the disease and in spite of the fact that they were extremely different from herself, she walked the journey with her patients. Those patients were most definitely the modern version of the lepers that Jesus touched, cared for, and healed.

Part of my interest in this movie was that I lived in the Dallas area in the 80s, and I wondered what the movie’s perspective would be. I was a bit nervous that the church would come off very badly, as many conservatives shouted down AIDS victims as people receiving the just rewards of their sins. Actually, the church has very little presence in the movie at all. That might not reflect so well on the church either, but at least we didn’t get bashed.

And maybe we should been. One church that I know of was offering classes on the rather large gay population in Dallas. I’m not sure if the intention was informational or to offer ideas on how to evangelize. As an early teen, I read through the photocopied study guide, and if there was anything spiritual it was lost on me. What I got was an eye-opening account of what was purported to happen in gay bars and bedrooms, and the purpose of including all of that could only have been to raise fear in the conservative Christian mind. If I were gay I might feel the same way about straight people if someone presented a handbook to me that detailed all the perversities that a certain segment of straight people engage in at bars or behind closed doors.

Beyond my curiosity about how Dallas in general, and “my people” there in particular, might be portrayed, there is another reason I wanted to see it. In January of 1982, I was 13 and going through my second of three major hip operations. At home after surgery, I started having agonizing pain in one leg and I was brought to the hospital by ambulance. I had internal bleeding and had lost a lot of blood. The doctor told my parents afterward that I really had needed a transfusion, but they had decided not to do it. He sort of hesitated, and then he didn’t really explain that any further.

Over the next year, we started to hear more about AIDS. It wasn’t until 1986 that all blood in the U.S. was tested for HIV, and one study says that by then 60% of America’s 20,000 hemophiliacs were infected from transfusions. If I had gotten that transfusion, I could very well have suffered the way that young Ryan White did, being barred from his school, threatened, and avoided. It was very early in the epidemic, and people were just terrified. So it hits close to home, knowing that I could easily have joined the ranks of the victims.

Dallas Buyers Club is a very gritty movie that traces the arc of a man from fearful hate to tolerance and compassion. But for me, all three of the main characters demonstrate in one way or another the kind of love we need, and often fail, to show—a love that comes not from our regard for an individual’s achievements or moral compass, but a love that stems from valuing each person as a beloved creation, formed in our Father’s image.